“It’s an old story,” Helena James said. “It’s the past and over and done with, as good as buried with the dead once I’m gone.”
CAMILLE UNDERSTOOD THAT PEOPLE often wanted to erase the pain of what they’d been through, to reinvent the past and their part in it. He’d seen this for himself in the Market Square on July 3, when the proclamation emancipating all slaves in the Danish West Indies was read. It was a joyously received, a long-overdue declaration brought about by the King’s governor, Peter von Scholten, who himself had a common-law wife who was a free woman of mixed blood. Eight thousand slaves on St. Croix living under appalling conditions had demanded and been granted emancipation from the Danish government, and von Scholten had been there to witness how this could be accomplished without bloodshed. He had set the same process to work in St. Thomas, and at last the King had granted these demands.
Camille was glad to be there for the changes that were taking place, a witness to these cruel laws abolished. He noticed those who had been in favor of slavery and who’d been forced to free their workers, now behaved as if they had never used such labor. Most of the African slaves were from Ghana, for the Danes had a fort there, one identical to the fort on their own shore. It was the gate to hell, and it would now be closed. People threw paper and bark inside the doorways of their fort and watched as the windows lit up with a flickering orange light, as if the fort were a lantern that could send a message across the ocean. No more, was the message. Not in our life and time.
There was a great party in the public square that lasted most of the week. Because the date was the third, all that year babies were given names with three letters, for three was clearly a lucky number. But for many people there was a bitterness ingrained in the celebration, for they had been granted something that should have been theirs all along. For the older people, it was also a time of mourning for all the years and lives that had been stolen.
Rosalie went to the grave of the child she had lost. She wished he was alive and had grown up to become a young man who could celebrate freedom for all on their island. She took the fallen leaves from her hair and placed them under her pillow so she would dream of her baby. She no longer thought he’d been taken because she loved him too much. That was foolishness someone had told her, that she’d drowned him, poisoning him with her own milk, and she’d taken the blame upon herself. The truth of the matter was, she loved Enrique too much as well, and her love had done no damage. He was still on this earth, alive and well, the handsome man she first saw in the garden of the Pomiés’ beautiful old house where strangers from Amsterdam lived now. She could hear these new people talking when she sat outside the cottage where she lived with Enrique, though she did not understand Dutch. She still worried about bad fortune even though she no longer believed love carried a curse. She feared that Enrique would be taken from her. But fate surprised her, and on the occasion of the proclamation she felt something she had felt only once before, the flicker of life.
She told Enrique that night, knowing he had always wanted a son. He said she could name the baby after the child she lost. That first baby’s name had been Leland Frost, a name she had told no one, and his father had been a sailor from St. Croix who had drowned. “No,” Rosalie said after carefully considering. “He’ll be his own person. He’ll have his own name.”
That was when she knew they would be starting everything all over again. They sat outside and had their dinner and watched the fires on the hill all around the fort, with orange and red flashes leaping upward. She had been attached to the motherless Pomie children, then Rachel had surprised her when she came to the house and asked for her help. Rachel had been so young and inexperienced, Rosalie had felt pity for her. But that was a long time ago, after the first Madame Pomié had taken ill and wept and Rosalie had wept with her. But a servant, no matter how beloved, was not a friend, and a slave was a shadow, nothing more. The sparks from the celebrations were so bright they looked like stars. It was the last night of the old world. Good riddance, Rosalie thought. She’d name this boy a name no one else had, so he could someday be his own man, one who could stand up to the devil himself.
There were bonfires all around Skytsborg Tower, called Sky Tower, built in 1678 on the highest point overlooking the harbor. It was here that the pirate Blackbeard, born Edward Teach, had lived during his time in the island. Blackbeard was rumored to light cannon fuses dipped into limewater under his hat and in his beard so that smoke would encircle him. He would look as fierce as the devil, and some people believed that he was. His enemies so feared him they would simply turn over their boats and goods to him and even grant him their wives. His fourteen wives got the worst of the bargain, for he’d abandoned each one. Their skeletons could still be found in the hillside caves. Camille had come upon their wild gardens while he walked at night, so deep in the thickets they’d disappeared for a hundred years. Here untended avocado plants and patches of mint and juniper grew wild, rambling down hillsides, mixing with native plants. He sketched the jumbled remains, an exotic mixture of hope and despair, with vines run riot. Some gardens were bordered by seashells and rocks, others had tumbled-down fences made of bones and rocks, still another was surrounded by banks of pink and red that had all sprung from a single rosebush brought from Madagascar. He liked to search for these gardens when he went into the countryside to visit Helena James, bringing her delicacies he’d filched from the storeroom. Chocolates from France, coconut syrup, oranges sent from Florida. If he found bougainvillea, he plucked some vines and brought them along as well, then sketched them as they trembled in a vase on her table.